I have a strange habit. I like to imagine what world-class athletes would be doing if they weren’t world-class athletes. Because the odds of them, of anyone really, becoming great at something has to be a combination of hard work, opportunity, dumb luck and perhaps some mystical, fate-driven push from the gods.
Blog Posts
I'm a List Maker. Perhaps because of my fruitless craving to create order from chaos, I spend Saturday mornings sifting through the mess of my week to figure out what needs doing and what I should just toss in the bin. Plus, I'll admit to a touch of OCD. Not ashamed. Subscribe whole-heartedly to The Law of Straightness.
Performance experts tell us that the most important ingredient to mastery is deliberate practice, playing at the edge of our abilities for hours and days and years. That's academic-speak for failing.
The beginning of the end. A little while ago, I wrote a book about the psychological elements of sports performance. I wanted to understand how elite athletes were so much better than the rest in the way that they thought, in what they believed and somehow figure out why this made them great. I devoured books and research papers looking for a better answer than just “natural talent”. That didn’t make enough sense to me. I shared parts of the …
I'm fascinated by the deepest biological reasons that create world-class performance. When you strip it all down, we are a fantastic arrangement of ...
Beautiful statement on mastery. It’s a lot of fun. It feels fluid. I used to play baseball, and it’s like when you’re ...
The US Tennis Open is disappearing in my rear-view mirror and I'm pushing away the feelings of withdrawal by ...
How much further can the science of training and nutrition improve an athlete’s performance? I wonder if ...
“My game is very good when I have nothing in my head, when I just play my game, when I don’t think about other things like the wind, people in the box, all this stuff, the photographers. Sometimes it’s tough for me, the [photographer’s] click. Now I just relax and play my game.” – Jo Wilfried Tsonga, after beating Mardy Fish at the US Open in five sets.
A year ago, I cut my cable down to just the basic channels. I was pretty sure that I could make do without Comedy Central, Food Network and those programs about couples trying to make a palace out of a shack using scrap wood. But what I discovered I really missed was live sports. A few minutes of highlights on the web or reading about the result online the next day took all the drama away. Jonah Lehrer describes a …